George Bernard Shaw- GBS for short- remains one of my favourite playwrights and this play by him one of my favourite plays.In fact, I am surprised at myself that I thought of this book rather late!
GBS loved to call his plays sugar coated pills because he deftly hid his didacticism amidst a conversational opera of sparkling humour. And alas for him! Probably his plays have survived popular due to this very quality rather than the embedded message.His interminable prefaces are worth a mention because of the lovely language rather than the preachiness.
The very title of this play is an enigma- ' Apple Cart' sounds too trivial to be a Shavian play. But it originates from the phrase ' to upset somebody's apple cart' i.e. to put somebody's well laid plans to nought.
In this case, it is the lead character King Magnus who upsets the apple cart of his cabinet led by his seemingly blustering but shrewd Prime Minister Proteus.
The plot is that King Magnus is the king of England where the monarch is the constitutional head of state. His cabinet is of the view that he should be a mere cipher and should only be of ceremonial value. A very telling instance is when he is advised by them that he should make no statements or asides on matters of policy. " But statements like -we declare this foundation stone well and truly laid- were in order."
King Magnus possesses a native shrewdness and a belief that a constitutional monarch stands as a bulwark against the heavy weather of politics fostered by the weathercock nature of public opinion.However, his cabinet is as determined to force an ultimatum upon him- either he function entirely on their advice or they approach the people for the last word on this.
The two chief scenes of the play are those of verbal confrontation between the king and his minsters. There is one speech of the king that I simply cannot resist reproducing-
MAGNUS [continuing] Naturally I want to avert a conflict in which success would damage me and failure disable me. But you tell me that I can do so only by signing pledges which would make me a mere Lord Chamberlain, without even the despotism which he exercises over the theatre. I should sink below the level of the meanest of my subjects, my sole privilege being that of being shot at when some victim of misgovernment resorts to assassination to avenge himself. How am I to defend myself? You are many: I oppose you single-handed. There was a time when the king could depend on the support of the aristocracy and the cultivated bourgeoisie. Today there is not a single aristocrat left in politics, not a single member of the professions, not a single leading personage in big business or finance. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, more able and better educated than ever. But not one of them will touch this drudgery of government, this public work that never ends because we cannot finish one job without creating ten fresh ones. We get no thanks for it because ninety-nine hundredths of it is unknown to the people, and the remaining hundredth is resented by them as an invasion of their liberty or an increase in their taxation. It wears out the strongest man, and even the strongest woman, in five or six years. It slows down to nothing when we are fresh from our holidays and best able to bear it, and rises in an overwhelming wave through some unforeseen catastrophe when we are on the verge of nervous breakdown from overwork and fit for rest and sleep only. And this drudgery, remember, is a sweated trade, the only one now left in this country. My civil list leaves me a poor man among multi-millionaires. Your salaries can be earned ten times over in the city by anyone with outstanding organizing or administrative ability. History tells us that the first Lord Chancellor who abandoned the woolsack for the city boardroom struck the nation with amazement: today the nation would be equally amazed if a man of his ability thought it worth his while to prefer the woolsack even to the stool of an office boy as a jumping-off place for his ambition. Our work is no longer even respected. It is looked down on by our men of genius as dirty work. What great actor would exchange his stage? what great barrister his court? what great preacher his pulpit? for the squalor of the political arena in which we have to struggle with foolish factions in parliament and with ignorant voters in the constituencies? The scientists will have nothing to do with us; for the atmosphere of politics is not the atmosphere of science. Even political science, the science by which civilization must live or die, is busy explaining the past whilst we have to grapple with the present: it leaves the ground before our feet in black darkness whilst it lights up every corner of the landscape behind us. All the talent and genius of the country is bought up by the flood of unearned money. On that poisoned wealth talent and genius live far more luxuriously in the service of the rich than we in the service of our country. Politics, once the centre of attraction for ability, public spirit, and ambition, has now become the refuge of a few fanciers of public speaking and party intrigue who find all the other avenues to distinction closed to them either by their lack of practical ability, their comparative poverty and lack of education, or, let me hasten to add, their hatred of oppression and injustice, and their contempt for the chicaneries and false pretences of commercialized professionalism. History tells us of a gentleman-statesman who declared that such people were not fit to govern. Within a year it was discovered that they could govern at least as well as anyone else who could be persuaded to take on the job. Then began that abandonment of politics by the old governing class which has ended in all Cabinets, conservative no less than progressive, being what were called in the days of that rash statesman Labor Cabinets. Do not misunderstand me: I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics. But evil as it was in many ways, at least it stood above the tyranny of popular ignorance and popular poverty. Today only the king stands above that tyranny. You are dangerously subject to it. In spite of my urgings and remonstrances you have not yet dared to take command of our schools and put a stop to the inculcation upon your unfortunate children of superstitions and prejudices that stand like stone walls across every forward path. Are you well advised in trying to reduce me to your own slavery to them? If I do not stand above them there is no longer any reason for my existence at all. I stand for the future and the past, for the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions: for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the day's gluttony; for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science from professionalism, for everything that you desire as sincerely as I, but which in you is held in leash by the Press, which can organize against you the ignorance and superstition, the timidity and credulity, the gullibility and prudery, the hating and hunting instinct of the voting mob, and cast you down from power if you utter a word to alarm or displease the adventurers who have the Press in their pockets. Between you and that tyranny stands the throne. I have no elections to fear; and if any newspaper magnate dares offend me, that magnate's fashionable wife and marriageable daughters will soon make him understand that the King's displeasure is still a sentence of social death within range of St James's Palace. Think of the things you dare not do! the persons you dare not offend! Well, a king with a little courage may tackle them for you. Responsibilities which would break your backs may still be borne on a king's shoulders. But he must be a king, not a puppet. You would be responsible for a puppet: remember that. But whilst you continue to support me as a separate and independent estate of the realm, I am your scapegoat: you get the credit of all our popular legislation whilst you put the odium of all our resistance to ignorant popular clamor on me. I ask you, before you play your last card and destroy me, to consider where you will be without me. Think once: think twice: for your danger is, not that I may defeat you, but that your success is certain if you insist.
But all this fine talking by the king is of no avail- his cabinet is adamant. Finally , the king brings out his ace of trumps-he threatens to abdicate in favour of his son and contest elections to the House of Commons, maybe forming a new party.
The ministers realized that the king would sweep such elections, and the Prime Minister tears up the ultimatum in a gesture of disgust.
In betwixt this main plot, there is a funny interlude of the American ambassador visiting the King and Queen and putting forth a fantastic proposition- that of the United States rejoining Great Britain and cancelling the declaration of independance! The king jocularly responds that to avoid making Britain a mere appendage of the United States, he would raise the old war cry of Sinn Fein and fight for their independance!!
King Magnus is one of my favourite characters in fiction. Wise and sagacious, but practical and shrewd in worldly affairs. A person who enjoys the company of a mistress, but shares a lasting and affectionate relationship with his wife of many years. With more wit and less bluster than his formidable Prime Minister. Of good and mesmerizing speech, but my no means a preacher. A statesman in his quiet way.
Have I gone overboard with praise? Probably, but then I prefer these plausible heroes to Ayn Rand's superheroes :)
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